Royalist Fleet Crushed: Scotland's Last Invasion Fails

A Royalist force under the Marquess of Montrose crossed from Orkney to mainland Scotland in April 1650 but was ambushed and routed by Covenanter cavalry at the Battle of Carbisdale on April 27, 1650. Montrose, James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, had been one of the most brilliant military commanders in British history during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, winning a series of stunning victories across Scotland in 1644-45 with a small army of Highland clansmen and Irish soldiers. Those victories had made him legendary, but they were also five years in the past. In 1650, he returned from European exile at the request of the exiled Charles II, who had commissioned him to raise a Royalist army in Scotland. The force Montrose assembled in Orkney was small, poorly equipped, and composed largely of foreign mercenaries who had little knowledge of Scottish terrain or politics. When they crossed to the mainland, they were quickly located by Covenanter forces under Colonel Archibald Strachan. The battle was brief and decisive. Strachan's cavalry charged the Royalist position near Carbisdale and broke the formation. Montrose escaped the battlefield and fled into the Highlands, hiding in the wilderness for several days before being betrayed by Neil MacLeod of Assynt, who turned him over to the Covenanters in exchange for a reward. Montrose was transported to Edinburgh, where he was subjected to a public spectacle designed to humiliate him. He was paraded through the streets, condemned by Parliament without a proper trial, and hanged on May 21, 1650. His execution ended the last serious Royalist military effort in Scotland before Charles II's own invasion later that year. Montrose's reputation as a romantic, doomed cavalier persisted for centuries in Scottish literature and history.